Overview

The terminal is your home base in Coldtea. It is a real terminal pane for local CLI agents and shell commands, and the rest of the workspace is arranged around it: the editor and browser dock beside your panes, and agent teams launch into panes of their own.

Coldtea hosts the CLI agent you already use instead of replacing it with a custom chat transcript. You keep your own agent and your own workflow rather than getting locked into a bespoke chat UI, and the whole flow from prompt to review lives in one place instead of across five tools.

In this section:

• Panes and tabs: new tab, splits, tab switching, the pane context menu, and pane labels.
• Composer: the prompt box over a pane, with @-file mentions, file attachments, and voice input.
• Editor: an embedded OpenVSCode build with inline AI autocomplete, theme sync, native VS Code shortcuts, and the Source Control view for git.
• Browser: an in-app browser (⌘⇧B) for your local dev server, with zoom, dock or float, and page annotations.
• Agent teams: launch several agents together, one terminal pane per role, from a preset or a saved team.

What real terminal means

The agent runs as a normal process in a PTY. Its output, prompts, permission requests, colors, and interactive behavior belong to the CLI you launched.

If the agent asks you to approve a command, you approve it in the terminal. If it needs login, complete the CLI's login flow. If a command is dangerous, stop it the same way you would outside Coldtea.

Coldtea adds the surrounding workspace: panes, tabs, brews, tasks, editor context, worktrees, search, and annotations. It does not make terminal commands safe by being nearby.

Starting from an empty pane

An empty terminal pane shows installed agents and quick-launch shortcuts. Use Ctrl+1 through Ctrl+9 to start the first installed agents from the workspace home.

You can also open the composer with ⌘N or Ctrl+N, choose an agent, and send the first prompt.

Find

Press ⌘F on macOS, or Ctrl+F on Windows and Linux, to open find in the active terminal. Type your query and step through matches with the next and previous controls. Toggle case sensitivity from the find bar. Close it with the close control or by clearing the query.

Copy and paste

Select text to copy it, then paste with the usual shortcut for your platform. Coldtea routes copy and paste into the terminal when the terminal holds focus, and into the editor when the editor holds focus. Copy and paste are also in the pane context menu.

Selecting terminal text also lets you turn it into review context, where annotation actions are available.

Clickable links

The terminal detects http and https URLs, including the ones agents print. A plain click still positions the cursor or selects text. Hold ⌘ on macOS, or Ctrl on Windows and Linux, and click a link to open it in your default browser.

Drag files in

Drag one or more files from Finder or the editor onto a terminal pane to drop their paths into the command line. Coldtea quotes the paths for the shell, so paths with spaces stay intact. Path drag-drop is available on macOS and Linux.

Inline images

The terminal renders inline images that an agent or command emits, so a chart or screenshot shows in place rather than as an escape sequence. Coldtea keeps visible images in mind when it manages scrollback, so an image on screen is not evicted mid-view.

Clear the screen

Press ⌘K on macOS to clear the active terminal's screen. The agent or shell keeps running; clearing the screen does not stop the process or start a new one.

Activity cursors

When an agent is working in a pane, Coldtea can draw a floating activity cursor over the terminal to show where the action is. You control when these appear in settings, separately for Agent Teams panes and normal terminals.

Session restore

When you switch back to a tab or reopen Coldtea, it restores your terminal panes and reattaches to the running sessions. A brief "reheating" overlay shows while a pane comes back. Coldtea keeps each session's scrollback in its backend and rehydrates it as you scroll up, so earlier output is still there after a restore.

Comments and annotations

Terminal annotations are useful when the important context is output, not code. Select or click the relevant terminal line, add the comment, then send the comment back to the agent when you want it addressed. Read comments and annotations for the full flow.

Do not assume the agent automatically saw your comment just because it exists in the UI. Send or attach it through the available action, or quote the relevant terminal output in the prompt.

The window around the terminal

• The left sidebar lists your brews and projects. Toggle it with ⌘B (Ctrl+B on Windows and Linux) and drag its right edge to resize; Coldtea remembers the width.
• The right dock holds the editor (⌘⇧E) and the browser (⌘⇧B) when you run them beside your panes. It is clamped so it never crowds out the panes.
• Tasks (⌘⇧T), agent teams (⌘⇧A), and settings open as overlays over the main area. Your terminals keep running underneath, and the same shortcut closes the overlay.
• The project switcher at the top names the active repository; switching it re-points the panes, editor, and browser at that project. The TeaHouse switcher next to it changes your shared workspace.

A safe terminal habit

Before running or approving a command, check three things:

1. Which project or worktree is this pane in?
2. Which agent or shell process is active?
3. What would this command touch if it is wrong?

That habit is slower than pressing Enter. It is also cheaper than cleaning up the wrong checkout.

Next: review agent work, or learn how agents run in Coldtea.